Quotes on religion
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.
Link to Quote
John Updike Quotes
All religions must be tolerated... for... every man must get to heaven his own way.
Link to Quote
Frederick the Great Quotes
The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Link to Quote
Ezra Pound Quotes
Scriptures: the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Link to Quote
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Link to Quote
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
Link to Quote
Francis Bacon Quotes
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Link to Quote
Thomas Jefferson Quotes
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
Link to Quote
George Orwell Quotes
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Link to Quote
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. He is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does one see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Link to Quote
Chapman Cohen Quotes
Individual Christians are the only ones really - and Jewish people, those who trust God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - are the only ones that are qualified to have the reign, because hopefully, they will be governed by God and submit to Him.
Link to Quote
Pat Robertson Quotes
Christian fundamentalism: the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.
Link to Quote
Andrew Lias Quotes
Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.
Link to Quote
Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
Fantastic doctrines, like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
Link to Quote
Edward Abbey Quotes
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.
Link to Quote
Jonathon Miller Quotes
The true Indian sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, because to him all days are God's days. The first American mingled with his pride a singular humility. Spiritual arrogance was foreign to his nature and teaching.
Link to Quote
Ohiyesa of the Santee Sioux Quotes
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Link to Quote
Albert Einstein Quotes
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Link to Quote
Anne Lamott Quotes
Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.
Link to Quote
Francis Bacon Quotes
Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Link to Quote
Douglas Adams Quotes
I do not think witchcraft is a religion, and I do not think it is in any way appropriate for the U. S. military to promote it.
Link to Quote
George W. Bush Quotes
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Link to Quote
Emile M. Cioran Quotes
Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
Link to Quote
Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
Link to Quote
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
If Christian scientists had more science and doctors more Christianity, it wouldn't make any difference which you called in - if you had a good nurse.
Link to Quote
Finley Peter Dunne Quotes
More Muslims have died at the hands of killers than - I say more Muslims - a lot of Muslims have died - I don't know the exact count - at Istanbul. Look at these different places around the world where there's been tremendous death and destruction because killers kill.
Link to Quote
George W. Bush Quotes
Religions are like farts. Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.
Link to Quote
Picket Fences Quotes
The wages of sin are death, but after they take the taxes out, it's more like a tired feeling, really.
Link to Quote
Paula Poundstone Quotes
Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Link to Quote
Karl Marx Quotes
Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains... But it can put mountains where there are none.
Link to Quote
Friedrich Nietzche Quotes
The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.
Link to Quote
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Impiety, n.: Your irreverence toward my deity.
Link to Quote
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
Link to Quote
John Lennon Quotes
If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.
Link to Quote
Old Yiddish Proverb Quotes
Instead of being born again, why not just grow up?
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
Link to Quote
John Adams Quotes
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
Link to Quote
Denis Diderot Quotes
God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him?
Link to Quote
Martin Buber Quotes
God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
Link to Quote
Friedrich Neitzsche Quotes
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
Link to Quote
Dave Barry Quotes
I believe in God; I just don't trust anyone who works for him.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
On the sixth day God created man. On the seventh day, man returned the favor.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
It is fear that first brought gods into the world.
Link to Quote
Petronius Arbiter Quotes
The church is the great lost and found department.
Link to Quote
Robert Short Quotes
I appreciate that question because I, in the state of Texas, had heard a lot of discussion about a faith-based initiative eroding the important bridge between church and state.
Link to Quote
George W. Bush Quotes
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
Link to Quote
George Santayana Quotes
Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.
Link to Quote
Diderot Quotes
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Link to Quote
Carl Sagan Quotes
"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q. E. D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Link to Quote
Douglas Adams Quotes
Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
Link to Quote
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Link to Quote
George Santayana Quotes
There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
I do not believe in revealed religion - I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating on another.
Link to Quote
George Gordon Byron Quotes
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
Link to Quote
George Carlin Quotes
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
Link to Quote
Gore Vidal Quotes
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Link to Quote
Judith Hayes Quotes
If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
Link to Quote
Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Link to Quote
Thomas Jefferson Quotes
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Link to Quote
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
Link to Quote
Ghose Aurobindo Quotes
Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Link to Quote
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
Moral: a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.
Link to Quote
Donald Morgan Quotes
No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man.
Link to Quote
Lemuel K. Washburn Quotes
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Link to Quote
Dalai Lama Quotes
I think I'll believe in Gosh instead of God. If you don't believe in Gosh too, you'll be darned to heck.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.
Link to Quote
D. Dale Gulledge Quotes
I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.
Link to Quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
All men have need of the gods.
Link to Quote
Homer Quotes
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
Link to Quote
H.L. Mencken Quotes
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.
Link to Quote
Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
I prefer to think of them as the Ten Suggestions.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
The third major characteristic of God - "infinitude" - is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is exaggeration run amuck.
Link to Quote
George H. Smith Quotes
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Link to Quote
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Link to Quote
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
The point is, could God pass an examination in Theology?
Link to Quote
Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all.
Link to Quote
Edwin Lewis Quotes
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
Link to Quote
Imamu Amiri Baraka Quotes
When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.
Link to Quote
Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
Link to Quote
Annie Dillard Quotes
If God has created us in His image, we have more than returned the compliment.
Link to Quote
Voltaire Quotes
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created."
Link to Quote
Julian the Apostate Quotes
God is innocent. Noah built in a flood plain.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
Link to Quote
Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
Link to Quote
Pearl S. Buck Quotes
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
Link to Quote
Sigmund Freud Quotes
Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the church or not. It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us escapes.
Link to Quote
E. Haldeman-Julius Quotes
No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard.
Link to Quote
William Ernest Hocking Quotes
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
Link to Quote
Carl Sagan Quotes
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
Link to Quote
Sir Richard Francis Burton Quotes
Men rarely, if ever, manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Link to Quote
Robert Heinlein Quotes
On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.
Link to Quote
Barry Goldwater Quotes
There's something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt.
Link to Quote
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
Link to Quote
Thomas Szasz Quotes
Follow Descartes! Do not give up the religion of your youth until you get a better one.
Link to Quote
Martin H. Fischer Quotes
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.
Link to Quote
Carl Sagan Quotes
I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision.
Link to Quote
George W. Bush Quotes
No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
Link to Quote
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders' than any other agency in the world.
Link to Quote
Richard Le Gallienne Quotes
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.
Link to Quote
Charles Caleb Colton Quotes
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Link to Quote
H.L. Mencken Quotes
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.
Link to Quote
Joe Mullally Quotes
Not all religion is to be found in the church, any more than all knowledge is found in the classroom.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night.
Link to Quote
Woody Allen Quotes
God - but a word invoked to explain the world.
Link to Quote
Prat de Lamartine Quotes
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Link to Quote
H.L. Mencken Quotes
Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on.
Link to Quote
Author Unknown Quotes
The whole point of Christianity is that everyone in the world, from Charles Manson to Mother Teresa, deserves to go to hell.
Link to Quote
Sean Ningen Quotes
Art, science, philosophy, religion - each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.
Link to Quote
Edward Abbey Quotes
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Link to Quote
Walter Lippmann Quotes
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
Link to Quote
Michel de Montaigne Quotes
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.
Link to Quote
Eric Ambler Quotes
Christianity is not being destroyed by the confusions and concussions of the time; it is being discovered.
Link to Quote
Hugh E. Brown Quotes
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for our blessings.
Link to Quote
Garrett Hardin Quotes
None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The records do not show that Adam and Eve were married.
Link to Quote
Ed Howe Quotes
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
Link to Quote
David Hume Quotes
How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World! It is the creation of a god who "ever plays the geometer."
Link to Quote
Aldous Huxley Quotes
All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.
Link to Quote
Cathy Ladman Quotes
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
Link to Quote
G.C. Lichtenberg Quotes
My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance.
Link to Quote
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries.
Link to Quote
Karl Menninger Quotes
A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.
Link to Quote
Father Mulcahy Quotes
Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
Link to Quote
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said "Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.
Link to Quote
Desmond M. Tutu Quotes
I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.
Link to Quote
Peter Walker Quotes
Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.
Link to Quote
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Link to Quote
Lucius Annaeus Seneca Quotes
When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm. "What do you mean?" the media challenged me. "You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe in the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?" My simple answer is, "Yes, they are."
Link to Quote
Pat Robertson Quotes
My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.
Link to Quote
John Bunyan Quotes
If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
Link to Quote
Woody Allen Quotes